Archives and Historical Sources for Tanzania

Although Tanzania’s traditions of bureaucratic government, from the Omani sultanate of Zanzibar to the postcolonial government of Julius Nyerere, produced voluminous documentation, Tanzania’s state archives face the challenges of those in many African countries. Despite efforts to preserve documents in dedicated archives, maintaining high quality conditions for these holdings has been a low priority for the government until recently, and anxieties about the release of sensitive governmental material have left much of the postcolonial archive lingering in ministries and party offices under uncertain conditions. For the historian this means that research in Tanzanian history must consider a notional “grand archive” that consists of material spread across dozens of archival collections in Tanzania and around the world. The constitutive parts of this archive provide complementary collections and perspectives and remind the researcher of the need to consider not only an archive’s contents but the archive as an institution.